International Days |

German physician and microbiologist Dr. Robert Koch(b.1843 – d.1910) announced on the 24th March of 1882, that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease.

To commemorate this day in history, World Tuberculosis(TB) Day is observed as a Global Health Day of the World Health Organization(WHO) on 24 March, annually.

This World TB Day global event is to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis, and to step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic.

The following DIY poster highlights this event.

To help step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic, a national health information system(NHIS) should be used to integrate TB data and ensure the data generated by the NHIS are reliable and complete and arrive rapidly enough to be used for a national tuberculosis program (NTP).

A good notification system is thus one of the key elements for the success of a national communicable disease prevention and control program, like the NTP.

The NTP as a national public health surveillance system receives TB notification that uses electronic medical record (EMR) / paper-based medical record data to provide situational awareness for TB-related events.

Although the public health surveillance system leverages the International Classification of Diseases(ICD) from abstracted information about medically coded TB inpatient medical records, ICD codes are not primarily used for public health surveillance purposes.

However, ICD codes provide one way to measure uptake in populations at increased risk of TB, and help provide public-use data files for public analysis, and the NTP to conduct their surveillance of TB through case findings lists to identify cases of reportable TB.

As it is Pi Day 2023, I like to dedicate this post to relate to the use of pi in Health Information Management(HIM).

We all first met the pi in elementary geometry at school and it occurs in one of the first equations that you can solve; that is to find the circumference or areas of circles.

We remember that Pi (π) is a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159—when for pi, you substitute the fraction 22/7. Although it is a simple ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the decimal places appear to go on forever.

Pi is used extensively in mathematics and science, and its calculation has applications in various fields in healthcare too, including HIM.

For this post, I can think of three applications of pi, when pi is integral to HIM.

While the electronic medical record (EMR) is the core informational system for patient management across the healthcare system, the radiology information system (RIS) is considered the core system for the electronic management of imaging departments.

The RIS is the first example I can think of from my past inter-professional collaboration in a hospital setting, that pi is related in one way to HIM, i.e. through its use in medical imaging.

Medical imaging technologies, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), use pi in their calculations to generate accurate images of the human body. The measurements of these images are based on the circumference and diameter of the scanned area, and pi is used to calculate these measurements accurately.

In addition to the RIS, pi is used in the calculation of various health-related metrics, such as body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure.

Obesity is a common problem worldwide that independently confers risk for chronic disease and early mortality.

HIM professionals use the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) codes as a tool for medical diagnoses, to medically code obesity, and also to identify obesity documentation in the electronic medical records(EMR) problem list.

Other available sources in the EMR use an individual’s body mass index (BMI) to identify and categorise obesity into the Z codes of ICD-10.

The ability to identify and manage the care of patients who meet the criteria for obesity in ambulatory settings has significantly improved with the increased use of health information technology, especially with the use of EMRs.

It is here in the EMR, that It is worthy to take note of the humble pie in the calculation of BMI involves dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters, which involves the use of pi in the calculation of the area of a circle (since the formula for the area of a circle is A = πr^2).

As HIM professionals involved in research, we surely used pi in statistical analysis and modeling in HIM.

For example, pi is used in the calculation of confidence intervals, which are used to estimate the range of values within which a population parameter (such as a mean or proportion) is likely to fall. This is important in HIM, as it allows researchers and analysts to make inferences about the health of a population based on a sample of data.

In summary, pi is used in various ways in HIM, including medical imaging, the calculation of health-related metrics, and statistical analysis and modeling.

Its precise calculation and properties make it a valuable tool in the field of HIM.